I’m still salty about League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Literary Avengers is such an awesome concept, but what we got was so fucking bad Connery walked away from acting forever.
But it did give us one of the most beautiful movie cars ever which, you know, is nice.
Read the comic. It does so much better with the concept. Goddammit, can we get at least one good Alan Moore adaptation?! Look at the mans run of Swamp Thing! It’d do well as an animated movie, at the very least!
You didn’t like the watchmen tv show?
Not OP, but I wanted to like it only I couldn’t bring myself to keep watching. I can’t remember if I stopped before the end of the first episode or part way through the 2nd. I completely failed to connect with any of the characters, the setting, the premise or the politics.
I don’t mind fiction that’s a vehicle for political statements - I like Alan Moore - but it felt like a transparent vehicle for needlessly edgy politics, rather than a beautiful vehicle for needfully radical politics like Alan Moore’s stuff is.
But I barely watched it so I know this is a pretty hot take.
Fair enough. I enjoyed it but there’s so much good television out there these days that there’s not much point forcing your way through something you’re not enjoying.
I really don’t think we can and I’m fed up of them trying, why don’t they let old things be old and comics be comics?
You want to make a good film in the twenty twenties then write a film to be a film in the twenty twenties.
Just like Sandman, it could only be good if the man himself was at the helm, but he hates comics now.
I know it’s bad but for some reason as a kid I loved that movie lol.
You, personally, are the reason Connery quit acting.
11 year old me would be devastated to hear that.
Are you me? As a
kidteen I fucking loved LXG and Connery was my favorite actor so not seeing him again after that did devastate me a bitedit: time is weird
TV show with really interesting premise that is well written, well acted, with great sets:
Streaming service cancels it after the first season and doesn’t renew it.
RIP ‘Night Sky’ with JK Simmons. What could have been.
I was enjoying the heck out of The Peripheral. RIP.
I was just thinking about that show last night and wondering if/when season 2 was coming out, as it had good reviews, great cast, a good plot, and the dialogue was pretty good too.
Went to the Wikipedia page and found out Amazon cancelled it two months after it’s debut. Two months! They didn’t even give it a chance.
I watched with my SO and googled it right after we finished it to see when Season 2 was coming, thinking it would be a joke “haha only 2 years to wait for the next season” and it had already been cancelled. Rough.
Well that really sucks. I don’t even have a guess to what’s going on with that ending.
RIP Carnival Row. I thought it was a pretty damn good show, with excellent actors and good character building.
It hasn’t been “officially” cancelled, but it may as well be at this point.
I like shows like Andor which have a mildly interesting premise but rely on phenomenal writing and execution to really shine.
Why do Star Wars fans always forget the / in And/or?
Funnily enough, I have a playlist with the Andor score and some nice medley / covers which I have called “And/or”
Yeah I hesitantly tried out Andor as somebody who isnt the biggest Star Wars junkie, and it quickly flew to being my favourite Star Wars content by a mile. Really excellent writing imo
Somehow Palpatine returned
You know I’ve seen every other mainline Star Wars and several of the one-offs and TV shows but I never got around to this one and I haven’t really felt like I missed out.
Same. I read about it in memes mostly and at some point I was like ‘alright that’s enough of that’.
You’re right.
This thing again. Palpatine is in a room full of cloning tanks talking about having unnatural powers. Next scene characters mention cloning and dark powers. It’s just Poe doesn’t know how it happened (he’s not omniscient) and doesn’t much care. Fascism returned and he’s going to fight against it, that’s all he needs to know.
It’s explained but the hot take internet reactions missed it. And then memes were created to brag about being to stupid to understand something that happened in a Star Wars movie that a child could understand.
Somehow you don’t understand what things mean in a Star Wars movie. Congratulations!
Somehow all efforts from episode 4-6 were in vain and Anakin wasn’t the chosen one again because throwing Palpatine into the death star core didn’t have any impact on anything. Somehow they made everything Luke, Leia und Han achived pointless. Somehow cloning was easily achievable with some dark powers and somehow Palpatine cloned himself and chilled for a few dozen years. Somehow Palpatine was a father and somehow Rei was his granddaughter.
Yes just like my Grandfather fought in WWII in vain because fascism has returned to our world.
Except the fact that evil can return doesn’t actually mean opposing evil is in vain.
Also, you may be slightly not getting the point of Star Wars if you think that we’re supposed to believe Anakin is the chosen one and everyone is supposed to respect his greatness. Yes this is what Anakin believed of himself, but how did that go for him?
Luke was meant to kill his evil father (or rule at his side), it was his destiny. Luke refused that destiny, how did that work out for him? Pretty good until the real evil Empire (the Disney Corporation) came along.
Star Wars isn’t really about making prophecies come true. It’s about rejecting them and finding a better way.
You’re a Star Wars fan, you’re meant to reject the fascist ideals of past greatness, not conform to them! Have a balanced take on Star Wars, not leave it in darkness!
I know from your point of view JJ Abrams is evil, But only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Counterpoint: several flashy videos on the Internet told me that space samurai wisard films are bad now because there is a mean woman there and no kinky costumes.
This was Once Upon A Time on ABC. Could’ve been a really good show, but it was basically fanfiction written by a middle schooler.
How many times can you use amnesia in a show with seven seasons? How many times can you reveal that Character A is secretly related to Character B? How many times can someone get killed but then miraculously get better? How many times can you introduce absolutely world-breaking plot devices, only to forget about them immediately?
The answer for all of the above, for Once Upon a Time, is THERE’S NO FUCKING UPPER LIMIT.
It did have this absolutely fantastic exchange though…
Grumpy: We’re all going to go hang out with Happy.
Snow White: Didn’t he get turned into a tree?
Grumpy: Yeah, but we fixed that months ago! We do things when you’re not around!
…for which I’ll almost forgive all the rest.
‘Fables’ was a comic book that was the first to use the idea of characters from fairy tales living in the modern era. When people realized that everything was already public domaine we got two shows, neither as good as the comic.
Two shows?
After seeing all the weird ads in malls and on random food, I decided to read the wiki about this show. Sounds like a really really good premise!
But the moment I watched a random trailer… Yikes. Bad execution.
It was created by some of the same people who made Lost. Both shows relied heavily on flashbacks to make the shows seem more planned out. Both relied on inconsistent mythologies to fake worldbuilding.
This first Suicide Squad was hot garbage, the second was awesome.
Will Smith’s compulsive need to never be the bad guy didn’t help.
He did make an exception at the Oscars.
I’m willing to bet that his battered husband brain thought it was being gallant by defending the honor of his abuser.
The dude definitely hits his wife and children.
I mean he is…
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Rich.
Dad bless you
The second one should have just been called something else.
Every DC fan I knew had such a bad taste in their mouth for that Will Smith Suicide Squad.
That’s the beauty of the Suicide Squad, they die or escape or there are other teams, so they can wipe out the whole cast without hesitation because it fits into the plot constraints.
The Extended Cut version of the first movie is actually an okay time. It boggles the mind anyone would think it’s a good idea to pull every bit of backstory and subplot and give us the mess of a theatrical version we got.
Witcher :(
And I’m not talking about the casting or other stuff. Just the general writing and conversion from books to screen sucked ass
From what I’ve heard it would have been multitudes worse if Cavill wasn’t so passionate about the source, too.
Yeah I never read the books or played the games. So when I watched it I thought it was kinda janky because they were trying a little to hard trying to stay true to the books.
Then I later found out it wasn’t true to the books. Sure sometimes you need to change things to make a story work better for a new medium. But why is it so jank then?
If they made changes but it worked really well as a TV show because of those changes I can understand. And if the show is janky because they tried to stay too close to the books, I can understand. But they made a janky show that’s not true to the books. I don’t understand!
Some of the jank is because of the first book for sure. Doing three different converging timelines isn’t easy.
I’ve heard even that books aren’t that good, basically being medieval James Bond, but somehow even more misogynistic.
It was like a teenager wrote the dialogue.
Recently this was Hazbin Hotel for me. Thought I would give it a shot but it’s written like a kid’s show instead of an edgy adult comedy about demons.
How is it compared to Helluva Boss?
Much less clever and subtle. I would call that a pretty low bar, honestly. Helluva Boss also has a lot of poorly-written content IMO, but in Hazbin it’s nonstop bad writing until there’s a small glimpse of something competent. I would recommend Helluva Boss to anyone who likes shitposts and sitcoms, but I wouldn’t recommend Hazbin to anyone right now.
Damn, had high hopes, too bad.
Aw man, I was hoping it’d be better. I will still see and hope for the best.
I liked the hazbin hotel plot, but very much felt how you did about the helluva boss pilot. I thought hazbin was fun and quirky and I liked it a fair bit, helluva boss cranked up the edginess and immaturity but didn’t bring anything else that made up for it. Maybe the actual series is better Idk
The Dark Tower movie adaptation, I am a huge fan of the books and I was so looking forward to a 3 movie arc. Turned out 🤮
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If you like the concept of Upside Down, you might be interested in the anime movie Patema Inverted. It has the same premise and came out around the same time.
There’s this show called Stranger Things that also deals in the Upside Down.
It’s a little different. The Upside Down in Stranger Things is a kind of alternate dimension, whereas in the movies Upside Down and Patema Inverted it’s that gravity is reversed for some people.
Yeah in time showed great promise but the execution was crap Maybe they’ll do it as a series
Spelling error in a meme poking fun at bad writing. Hilarious.
rong righting
That leaves for an interesting question: why is most writing these days so god awful? There are great writers out there. Hollywood isn’t stupid (is it?) and wants money. Why do they put shit writers on so many projects that then flop like the shit that it is?
Hollywood is stupid and they didn’t want to pay writers after the first draft is written. It may not be so much the writer is shit (they came up with some good ideas after all) it’s that they don’t have time to make additional drafts to fix plotholes, improve the dialog, etc.
Writing isn’t just banging out something on a typewriter and it’s pure genius the moment is written. It’s a process that usually involves multiple drafts.
You gotta admit a lot of things feel like a first draft, and it’s probably because it is. Hopefully these issues were sorted out with the writer’s strike.
Because it’s targeting the lowest common denominator.
It’s generalizing the writing so that it generally appeals to generally everyone to increase engagement. This means that the show loses its specific attractions and it just becomes another generic TV show based in a different world.
Executives chasing profits with data they don’t understand, or the show just sticks around too long.
it’s not a simple answer but due to technology and environment, it’s just the way things are. basically less care is taken to get each minute of output simply because it’s possible. so many things. you don’t have to log heavy reels around, you don’t have to use a typewriter. each step is so much easier. before, there was a lot more care taken per step.
Most of everything is shit, you just remember the few good ones, you don’t remember the no name awful series that were airing together with Lost.
And even then Lost was also written with shit crayons. Especially the later stuff
With streaming, it’s become about volume not quality. Before there were only so many movie screens and straight to video made next to nothing.
Now straight to streaming can make a LOT of money. Plus streaming services are trying to pump their selection and in-house productions cost nothing once produced. So even average or just good enough content can be profitable.
What are your opinions on The Magicians?
The show where they have to sex each other in super sexy horny sex to cast some spell. Yeah sex magic wooo!! And what does the spell do? It just creates a column of light that some guy can use as a beacon to navigate.
My eyes rolled so hard I saw the back of my own skull.
I did not like the constant tonal shifts between silly magic frat boys and depressing magical apocalypse.
Cheesey as hell but still loveable.
Never watched enough to get a feel. I could not stand the whiney main character kid. He was like nails on a chalk board annoying…
Haha, have you read the books? It is a million times worse / more pretentious. The show was camp, which was at least kinda fun. Definitely an improvement anyway
Mr Robot the writing was so bad I genuinely spent several episodes thinking it was a parody of how bad Hollywood script writing had got.
Like someone was trying to make M Night Shyamalan’s Fight Club: Now with More Daddy Issues.
I was watching with two friends and I thought they didn’t like it because I was the only one laughing.
Mr. Robot is genuinely my favorite show and I was shocked to see it brought up in this thread. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
A lot of people don’t like Rami Malek talking to the viewer/breaking the fourth wall. I love the show but I’ll admit it can be a bit overly self-indulgent at times
That has nothing to do with the quality of the writing though.
Yeah, I used to bring it up a lot because plenty of people who don’t strike me as idiots seem to have enjoyed and respected it, which I probably find as confusing as you find my opinion.
Whats a show you think has good writing?
The Wire is almost a cliche to mention but the dialogue is frequently phenomenal.
Frasier has some incredibly well written farces - the ski lodge love pentagram episode is a great example.
Simpsons and Futurama have some episodes that are just gold from start to finish - cape feare, hell is other robots, war is the h-word. The jokes are all so good and so densely packed.
Arrested Development wobbles occasionally but when it’s good the writing is so well balanced - over the top while still being subtle.
The Great, season 1 at least. 2 was too awkward for me. I believe it was based on a play though, so maybe that didn’t count (I’ve been ignoring shows based on books).
Veep and The Thick of It have absolutely beautiful dialogue. The swearing, the insults. “Don’t mention Israel, Katherine” is a real triumph of a line.
Motherland, all of the characters are so impeccably written, it makes all the petty status games so transparent.
Deadwood has some lush dialogue.
Gavin and Stacy ekes so much joy out of impeccably written normal lives.
Derry Girls and London Irish. Moonboy.
Well I haven’t seen many of those shows but I agree with you on the ones I have, Simpsons futurama and AD.
Is there anything specific that sticks out to you as bad in mr.robot?
Mostly it was the cheesiest, most overused “twists” appearing with such mind numbing regularity that I honestly thought it was parody. Hence the M Night Shyamalan comparison. Which also made it feel like a 12 year old boy’s idea of deep.
And speaking of 12 year old boys, I remember not being able to tell if the dialogue was supposed to sound like an overly serious 4chan user because that was basically the personality of the main character, or if that was unintentional.
And the daddy issues! Whining about a distant or abusive father figure is the default character arc of US cinema. It’s probably an artifact of boomer screenwriters having dads messed up by ww2 but by now it’s like a painting of a naked lady on a couch - the single least interesting choice that will fill that space.
I honestly mean no disrespect to people who enjoyed it - it makes no sense to judge others based on the stories they like - but hopefully the above gives you a sense of how i experienced the show.
Those are pretty fair criticisms I guess. I just wasn’t as bothered by those aspects and I was more curious to see where the story would end up. Ill check out some of your recommendations. Cheers
I liked the first season of that show and some of the second, but after that it fell off real hard.
I completely agree, I don’t know why everyone sucks that show’s dick so hard every time it’s brought up. It’s good for TV, but a lot of it is just hard to watch because of how stupid the writing can be.
They put the emo chick in and there’s a lot of drugs so it’s deep and cool can’t you see.
At least the programming terms check out.
But I’ve heard the follow-up to Suicide Squad, “Birds of Prey (and some clown woman)” had great writing, so… does that even out?
And you would know, Margot Robbie! Good work!
Thank you!
Also, that’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
I haven’t seen Birds of Prey, but “The Suicide Squad” (not to be confused with “Suicide Squad”, which I also didn’t watch) was very good.
Edit I may be stupid,
Indeed, that movie is also pretty good.
